Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

With Alien 3 having come out before I was even born, I hadn't been aware of what a rocky production the blockbuster suffered from. Initially, William Gibson was meant to write the script for it, which, mind you, he did. While that potential version of the sequel never went into production, it now received a second life in form of this novel.



Alien 3: The Lost Screenplay is actually a novelisation of said screenplay, revealing that Alien 3 could have potentially turned out to be a very different film. Following the events of Aliens, it is an action-packed story of Corporal Hicks and the android Bishop as they battle their way through xenomorphs in an area that feels very reminiscent of the Soviet Union, but is instead called the Union of Progressive People here.

I thought the claustrophobic atmosphere didn't transfer quite as well onto the pages. While the story of the franchise occasionally likes to go a bit overboard in terms of believability, it's how everything feels that makes watching the films such a singular experience. That uncomfortable, dark and very specific atmosphere never quite came up in this novel, which might have something to do with the entire story being driven by fights and action, which I generally find more interesting on screen than on page.

The story is fine, just not very interesting altogether. Fans of Hicks will be pleased to find that he doesn't get killed off in the first five minutes of the story as he unceremoniously did (off-screen even) in the film, but instead even takes the lead here. This does cost us Ripley, though, who is stepping back in here and remains a mere name mentioned every now and then. The xenomorphs have become more deadly, too, which made them to me less interesting: they're nothing more than killing machines and became hard to see as proper antagonists as their existence felt so meaningless. Again something that I find easier to forgive on screen than I do in a novel, where I personally enjoy motives to threats and enemies.

This will probably appeal only to die-hard fans. A lot of the storytelling relies on you getting excited to spend more time with characters you already know. The novel itself doesn't give you a lot of reasons to root for the protagonists or be afraid of the enemies, so you should be familiar with the plot of the films, as this isn't an appropriate introduction to the franchise. In case you are an enthusiast, however, this might be an interesting excursion into how the story could alternatively have developed.